The most chilling sequence of The Jacket, the new not-quite-science-fiction
film starring Adrien Brody as a brain-damaged Desert Storm veteran
held in a psychiatric institution for a crime he didn’t commit,
actually takes place beneath the opening credits. I’m not sure
whether the night-vision imagery is actual wartime footage or an incredibly
savvy replication of the same, but if you’ve seen the real thing
you won’t forget it — tiny, monochromatic human figures
are targeted and obliterated in sudden smears of light representing
the limb-tearing, flesh-melting explosions of battle. What’s
most sobering is the degree of abstraction between the visceral chaos
of war and the sanitary videogame-style view of the battlefield that
this footage represents — U.S. military forces, operating at
the kind of comfortable remove from the action that only the finest
industrial technology can guarantee. The question is immediately posed:
what does this kind of experience do to a man?

In the film’s opening sequence, an Iraqi child nails soldier
Jack Starks (Brody) in the head with a bullet fired from a handgun,
setting the rest of the story in motion. Jack dies from his injuries
(he says as much in voiceover), but miraculously comes back to life
before anyone gets around to zipping up the body bag. He gets shipped
back to the U.S., and there his troubles really begin. The
Jacket is
about a specific injury to a specific soldier, but it seems emblematic
of the experience of going to war and returning to home — a not
completely welcoming environment — fundamentally changed. It’s
about a certain callousness in the way these men are treated — the
ways in which people who are already suffering are made to suffer more
at the hands of government lackies who claim moral and medical authority
but who project only smug superiority.

That’s not to say it’s new stuff. The
Jacket is plainly
derivative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jacob’s
Ladder, juiced up with interesting visuals, fine performances — and
some chronological monkey-business. During Jack’s incarceration,
he’s treated by one Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) who has ideas
about treating violent patients that are more punitive than therapeutic:
he shoots them full of drugs, restrains them in a straitjacket, and
imprisons them in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. And it’s
during his time in the drawer that Jack enters a sort of alternate
reality. He meets Jackie (Keira Knightley, apparently applying for
the job left vacant by the young Helena Bonham Carter), a stranger
who seems vaguely familiar. Once he figures out how and where and when
he first met her, Jack starts using his time in the jacket to struggle
toward a happy ending.

John Maybury’s direction is its most flamboyant in the little
visual flourishes that give the film its juice — the whip zooms
right into Brody’s eyeballs as his out-of-body experiences begin,
aided and abetted by Brakhage-style distressed celluloid. Elsewhere,
the mood is pretty deadpan. What keeps it rolling along, even as the
storyline becomes more tortuous, is Maybury’s command of the
details, accentuated by nuanced, very-widescreen photography of the
sweet-faced Brody and the waifish Knightley by D.P. Peter Deming (you
get a sense for Maybury’s respect for the human face when you realize
that his most famous work to date was the music video for Sinéad O’Connor’s
“Nothing Compares 2 U”). There’s an unobtrusive score by Brian Eno.
By the time Jennifer Jason Leigh shows up in a supporting role, it’s
clear how seriously you’re meant to take all of this. And if
the narrative in itself isn’t immensely satisfying, there’s
a lot of pleasure to be had in just watching the way it unfolds, moment
by moment. (In this regard, it’s like the B-movie version of
prestige project Birth, another ambitious-verging-on-pretentious
screenplay adroitly lensed by a director with impressive formal command.)

[spoilers begin here]

Now, what you probably don’t want to know on the way into the
movie is that when Jack hooks up with Jackie, it happens in the year
2006, strongly suggesting that the combination of drugs and sensory
deprivation has given him the ability to travel through time. Now,
I found a transcription of a priceless press roundtable with director
John Maybury from just before the movie opened which begins with a
writer asking about his favorite time-travel stories and getting the
response, “This isn’t a time-travel movie.” He then
floats the idea — half-joking? — that Adrien Brody’s
character did, in fact, die on the battlefield in Iraq. Now, in the
world of the film I suppose that’s possible. Almost everything
we see could be Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge hallucination
inside a troubled, war-addled mind. Then again, unless this fellow
is a novelist, how does it make sense that he’d concoct an elaborately
science-fictional narrative riddled with characters whom he’s
apparently never met? It’s also possible, and perhaps more likely
based on the evidence in the screenplay, that the main character checks
out of this world sometime during his incarceration, conjuring a fantastic
death-dream involving the redemption of a mother-and-daughter couple
he met at the side of the road. Or maybe The Jacket really is a
time-travel movie and Maybury doesn’t know it or is loath to
admit it.

Whatever. The film’s real interest seems to be torture — mean-spirited
this-is-good-for-you torture of the kind that’s been in war-related
news headlines lately. Whether Maybury considers it time-travel or
not, the story is contrived to deliver a comeuppance to its chief torturer
and to coax an impossibly upbeat denouement out of abject suffering.
The Jacket isn’t a fully realized film, but there’s something
compelling about Maybury’s interest in the material, which is
far from literal — I’m not sure how I feel about his wholesale
theft of “Mothlight” as a backdrop for The
Jacket’s end
credits, but just as Brakhage was interested in giving new, frenzied
celluloid life to the insects dead in his light fixtures, it seems
to be Maybury’s
intention to reanimate a casualty of war through the imagination of
cinema. Even in this context, The Jacket doesn’t really cohere,
but it may be interesting to watch how Maybury’s ideology works
itself out on screen if he does wind up having any kind of Hollywood
career.